So you want to be a trad wife
Thoughts on that viral piece from The Cut and anti-feminist movements.
The dawn of the internet and online activism has made the sequential waves of feminism a bit blurry. The last I was tapped in, we were on third-wave feminism, which in summary addressed (is addressing?) sexual politics for women and their right to openly embrace and engage in overtly sexual displays. This wave started for me in college, not long after pop stars like Beyonce openly announced themselves as feminists all while showing skin and twerking on the screens of millions.
The passage of time — or rather, the accelerated speed with which we move through discourses online — would dictate that we’re potentially on fourth-wave feminism, likely sharpening philosophies around gender inclusivity and bodily autonomy. Curiously concurrent with these discussions, another movement has begun on social media in the influencing space: trad wife content.
An offshoot of “soft life” content (which itself was an offshoot of “divine feminine” content), trad wives, short for traditional wives, hit like a tidal wave across TikTok and Instagram last year. The typical trad wife is conventionally attractive, presumably upper class, cis, straight, and white. She often has children, though it doesn’t seem to be a requirement. She is also usually religious, though not all trad wives are Bible thumpers to their followers. Their content provides tutorials to other cis, straight women on how to embody traditional gender roles in the service of husbands and children, as well as vlogs on their day-to-day domestic work.
In the drudgery of 9 to 5s and financial responsibilities, the trad wife life has become appealing to many women seeking respite from it all. This subculture has given rise to adjacent trains of thought on women’s roles in relationships to men that, while not entirely representative of trad wife culture, promote the same themes of the lifestyle.
Enter this recent piece from The Cut that sparked ire and confusion across social media. In it, writer Sophia Grazie Christie describes the reasoning behind her decision to date a man 10 years her senior (37, to be exact). As she details, young men in their 20s are simply too immature to be reliable partners, forcing women of their same age to sacrifice too much energy in the relationship to essentially mature them. In various glimmers throughout the article, she makes salient points about the state of dating men today. She ate with this one particular paragraph:
“There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.”
Yet, for every “she’s got a point” part of this article, there is an equal or greater amount of head-scratching parts. She describes the comfortable life her French and financially-stable husband provides her, and the ease with which he slotted her into his life. She rejects the label of having a “partner,” instead praising a colder set of labels instead.
“My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.” [emphasis mine]
A chill just went down my spine. Whew.
Nowhere in this article does the author claim to be a trad wife. Indeed, she talks at many points in the piece about career aspirations of herself and other women. But, in her expressed desire for women to rest, to have ease in their lives, she is legitimizing the same ideology pushed by trad wives — that women are best suited to be fit within a man’s life.
A mentor is a teacher of a different name. If your mentor is your husband as a woman, then you are acknowledging that he is a tier above you in terms of experiences. We would balk at a man calling his wife his mentor because based on traditional gender roles, this dynamic makes no sense.
What’s more, her assertion that her husband’s age is the reason he’s able to provide a lavish life for her is misguided. As one commenter on the article put it:
Christie, perhaps swept up in sweetness of her own life setup, is conflating maturity with financial stability. Talk to a single straight woman across any age group and they will tell you: maturity knows no age when it comes to men. The only maturity somewhat correlated with older men is financial, but only in take-home pay. Yes, financial security means that the stresses of meeting your basic needs is not a factor, which immediately relieves a potential point of tension within a union. Still, a high salary doesn’t guarantee that a man is good with money or interested in sharing it with a spouse, nor does it have the power to force a man to “grow up.”
Even if we reconsider the first quoted paragraph above, men don’t magically learn how to care for themselves and become functioning adults merely because they age. I’m sure some of us have dads to this day that would neglect domestic tasks and even their own basic needs if they didn’t have our moms to dote on them. There are many men walking around in their late 30s, 40s, 50s and so on who never learned the lessons of their former paramours. They are still emotionally stunted, unable to open up lest they sacrifice the power that society promised them as a reward for their stoicism.
A personal example of this is my mother. A widow to my father, who himself could barely engage in self-care in the best of health, she recently ended a relationship with a moneyed man in his 70s because he could not be vulnerable with her. He would repeatedly tell my mom that he cared for her, but couldn’t meaningfully open up about his emotions out of fear. Despite him providing lavish gifts, favors, and dinners for her, she realized she couldn’t continue their relationship because he was not nurturing her emotionally. This man is in his mid-70s. Based on Christie’s logic in the Cut piece, he should be the pinnacle of maturity.
Ultimately, her solution to women for the ills of capitalist patriarchy — because that’s what she’s describing, whether she realized it or not — is to simply marry older, rich men. Give yourself some rest, she says. But her argument falls apart with any amount of critical thinking.
““When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins.
If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her.
There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.”
Across the board, paternity leave is abysmal (and that’s saying something when maternity leave is hardly any better) so let’s start there. The amount of paternity leave a man is granted is usually dependent on his profession, not his age or tenure. Let’s also not pretend that the older, richer men she’s imagining to receive an abundance of paternity leave are the types to even want to take 6+ weeks off anyway. Men’s jobs foster a culture of discouraging time off with the implied threat of termination for not being “dedicated” enough.
There’s also a racial component that Christie likely didn’t consider, an expected blind spot given her comfortable European trad wife-adjacent lifestyle. She does not specify her husband’s race, but context clues indicate he is likely white. White men make substantially more money than Black and Latino men in her husband’s age group. The kind of extravagant lifestyle she covets and encourages her readers to seek in older men can only realistically be achieved with white men. Given that dating within one’s race is still the most common romantic setup, her experience with older – read, financially well-off – men is one largely closed to women of color.
Above all, the author’s Great Value Trad Wife lifestyle misses the mark because it unimaginatively rebrands the kind of femininity that second-wave feminists fought against. An ideology not exclusive to her, the writer’s approach to modern womanhood wants to have it both ways; it wants the professional benefits of feminism and the comforts of honoring patriarchy.
To close the pieces, she ponders:
Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing.”
A nice enough sounding sentiment on paper, it rings hollow if you read between the lines. The world she’s imagining seems to still be one nestled comfortably within capitalist patriarchy. She describes a hierarchical society where women are still climbing ladders to achieve financial stability. Nowhere is the role of men discussed. The gaping hole in her philosophy is the role that men must play in undoing these power structures. She is mistakenly assuming older men necessarily equate to emotional intelligence, selflessness, and doting tendencies toward a female spouse. Perhaps, if a man has dated enough women, he may be evolved enough to finally treat one well. At the end of the day, though, patriarchy only changes if enough men want it to change, and take actionable steps toward dismantling the masculinity that weighs women down.
There’s a reason the trad wife trend is most popular among white women. They have always been the biggest benefactors of patriarchy, what with white men running the world and all. If they play their hands right, smile, obey, they’ll have the comfortable lives they were promised as girls. The writer quips at one point that “men are too skilled at taking.” Men are also good at discarding, those multitalented devils. She only briefly considers the worst-case scenario of her marriage – that her husband could betray her, and she’d be forced to leave him. Given the comfort of the life she’s described, I hardly find it believable that she would leave him; it’s more likely he’d dump her for a younger woman once Christie reaches an age he deems undesirable.
That’s tomorrow’s problem, though. Why would women like Christie desire more for men at large now when they believe they have so much to gain from their own passivity?